To be clear: I do not think we should actually forget technical debt. Also, this is not the nth post discussing if “debt” is an appropriate metaphor. I do not have a strong opinion regarding the metaphor. My point is rather that I realized in a recent discussion that in the end, it is not so much about technical debt but rather about something else, and I wanted to share the thought.

I wrote a lot about the staggering complexity in IT, its detrimental effects, and what we can and should do about it (see, e.g., my “Simplify!” blog series. I wrote about the embedding of the complexity problem in a bigger context in my “Responsible IT” blog series). I also identified several drivers that usually increase accidental complexity, i.e., complexity in the solution which not needed to…

In the previous post, we discussed several observations, Lisanne Bainbridge made in her much-noticed paper “The ironies of automation”, she published in 1983 and what they mean for the current “white-collar” work automation attempts leveraging LLMs and AI agents based on LLMs, still…

In 1983, Lisanne Bainbridge wrote the much-noticed paper “The ironies of automation”. Being a cognitive psychologist, she discussed some counter-intuitive effects of automation in her paper. She called those effects ironies and paradoxes, providing precise definitions for both terms:

I think a lot about AI-assisted and AI-based coding. The first one is a human who writes code with more or less support of an AI solution. We see it all the time already now. The second one is a human leaving the coding part to a fleet of AI agents. If the human does not even look into the code created but treats it as a black box and looks at the solution only from the outside, i.e., only watches what it is doing, it is usually called vibe coding.